Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
About Searching

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### About Searching

The Encyclopedia's search engine is designed around a model that attempts to synthesize both keyword and topical searching. The basic idea is to view the Encyclopedia as a large, link-rich collection of Web pages. Link-rich means that each page is expected to have several links to other pages with closely related information. The distance between two pages can be measured as the minimum number of links that must be transversed to connect them. The closer two pages are in distance, the more closely related the information in those pages.

Each page can be also viewed as the root node of a tree of pages that ultimately engulfs every page in the Encyclopedia. This view is most relevent to searching.

A search form is provided as part of the standard header on most pages in the Encyclopedia. The search is performed on the tree constructed with that page at its root. One of search options that may be specified is its depth. The depth is the number of links that are transversed during the search. A depth 0 search is only a find on the current page. A depth 1 search searches all pages referenced by the current page. For example, a depth 1 search on an RFC Table of Contents (the default), searches the entire RFC, because every page in the RFC is linked to by the ToC. A depth 2 search would search the RFC, as well as pages referenced by the RFC, and so on. Not all search depths are supported by all pages.

The recommended search procedure follows:

1. Use the topical core to select your general area of interest
2. Narrow your search by finding the topical Web page most relevent to your search
3. Use the search panel on that page to perform a level 1 search for keywords of interest
4. If you do not find what you're looking for, expand to a level 2 search, and so on.
5. If you reach the search depth limit and still haven't found what you're looking for, select a page that appears to be more relevent that the current one and continue from there.

This method allows the user to rapidly narrow his search, while minimizing computational load on the server.

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
About Searching